Mary Ann Leff
Berkeley, CA
Mary Ann Leff is a mature painter, educated at Carnegie-Mellon University, she creates emotion-filled abstract acrylic paintings.
Message
Bio: Mary Ann Leff, born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, never doubted her identity as an artist. She began making art as a teenager, attending Saturday and summer classes at Carnegie Mellon University. Continuing at CMU and graduating from its School of Fine Arts, she was strongly influenced by Robert Lepper and his class “Individual and Social Analysis” that focused on community and personal memory as factors in artistic expression. He encouraged her to develop this through abstraction.
Her desire to understand this more deeply led to a study of psychology and psychotherapy after she moved to California. Working in the Bay Area, she maintained her art practice as she developed a psychotherapy practice. Sitting for hundreds of hours with psychotherapy patients she experienced the connection between emotion and expression and the impact of the unconscious. She saw how a shift in one person alters a relational field or a family system in the same way that an unexpected color or reflective surface transforms the entire composition of a painting. Exploring what is yet unknown and what lies beneath the surface with a patient runs parallel to her painting process. The abstract paintings she produces are emotionally charged and materially expressive. They explore the tension between the wish to stay hidden and the wish to reveal and be seen, between intimacy and distance, serving as a space of connection between viewer and artist, like the connection between patient and therapist.
Leff’s work has been exhibited in one person and group shows, art fairs, and featured in various publications.
Statement
Statement:
“Why do people make art?” an interviewer asked Joan Mitchel. “I don’t know,” she replied, “I think maybe it’s a kind of sickness.”
A pervasive sense of discontent and compulsiveness are my steady companions in my studio. I have always had a desire to make change, to discover something new, to look underneath and to dig deeper and it is why so many of my paintings are multi-layered and thick with paint. I add, subtract, revise, re-do, paint over, scrape and scratch, working and working until I have achieved the right sense of balance between revealing and concealing, and some sense of satisfaction finally lets me relax.
I often think of my paintings as self-portraits.
Communicating with no words, I reveal parts of myself. Using acrylic and metallic paint, the glossy surfaces can become literal and metaphorical mirrors that highlight both the separation and the connection between artist and viewer. We both merge and obscure each other.
As I work, my head and my hand(s--sometimes two at once) work together in constant conversation, each mark, each gesture, each color choice follows and responds to the one that preceded it. I look, remember, feel, and search for something new, for the right note. I add, subtract, rub out, scrape, expose and reveal. When I can trust my own experience and listen intently enough to the conversation, what is “abstracted” is a kind of wordless composition yearning to be looked at. Filled with the possibility for reflection, interpretation, and projection, it waits to be absorbed.